Oskar Schindler  Oral History

Ludmilla Page

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 US Holocaust Memorial Museum - Collections

Transcript

He was a very tall man. A little, I would say, kind of broad-shouldered. Very blond. Very blue-eyed, and had this air of, of, such goodness emanating from him. I remember later on when we were in the camp which he established in Sudeten at the very end of the war, you know, we were always freezing when we saw a German because it meant that either there will be shooting or there will be beating or there will be some other kind of, of, of, torture, moral or physical. But he, when he came, all we could see was Herr Direktor. We used to call him Herr Direktor, and he smelled awfully good, you know, and he was always dressed beautifully, and always dropping cigarettes all over, he was smoking a cigarette, and then put butts around so the people could pick it up and smoke it, because, of course, they didn't have any cigarettes.

Ludmilla was born to an assimilated Jewish family in Kishinev, Romania. She and her mother, a physician, were living in Poland when the Germans invaded on September 1, 1939. They were taken to Krakow. Ludmilla was forced to live in the Krakow ghetto; her mother was sent to the Warsaw ghetto. Ludmilla worked in a factory at the Plaszow labor camp for a businessman who was a friend of the German industrialist Oskar Schindler. In October 1944, Schindler attempted to save some Jewish workers by relocating them to a munitions factory in Bruennlitz, in the Sudetenland. Ludmilla was among those on Schindler's list to be relocated. She and about 300 other women were detained briefly in Auschwitz before reaching Bruennlitz. There, some of the workers sought to sabotage the production of munitions. Ludmilla was liberated in early May 1945.